Hero To Zero 2nd edition Page 6

  The lieutenant had already discovered that Mike had expunged his arrest record. He had access to the state file at an admin level, which granted him unlimited access to the records. He asked Mike to explain the arrest.

  Mike admitted that he was really scared. His dream was slipping away, but he came clean and told the lieutenant everything—all of it, more than was even in the files. The lieutenant was impressed by his honesty, and thought it over. This was before software had the ability to track a user’s action in a program, and when he’d finished thinking about it, the lieutenant simply deleted Mike’s arrest and conviction record, and then told him to act like this had never happened. Mike never saw his records deleted; they just never existed. Understood?

  Mike understood. His dream had been saved, and he never forgot the gift he had been given. Mike told me of the incident and how he could not believe his luck. This couldn’t happen today, but in 1985 it was possible, and did happen. The witch-hunt stopped and Mike continued on with his career.

  Mike had a passion. Like every other cop in this book, he was exceptional at something. In Mike’s case, he was exceptional at finding stolen bicycles.

  To understand Mike’s passion you had to know his history. For most of us at the department, Mike’s passion was a mystery, so I asked Scott, his brother, why Mike was so determined to locate every stolen bike in the city. Scott rolled his eyes.

  “You have to understand, Mike had a bike when he was thirteen years old. He saved all his money and bought the bike of his dreams—a Schwinn Continental. He had it for about one month, showing it off to the whole neighborhood, and then one day it was stolen from behind our garage.”

  Mike blamed Scott, of course. He said Scott had left the bike lock undone, and that the Hispanic family across the street must have taken it. Mike was pissed beyond belief, and heartbroken.

  Their dad also thought one of the Hispanic kids must have taken it. At the time, Scott was hanging out with one of that family’s kids, and he invited him over for dinner and to play basketball, much to his dad’s disapproval. When the bike was stolen, Mike’s dad confronted the eight-year-old Hispanic boy, and told him that he could no longer come over to play with Scott.

  “I know that you had something to do with stealing Mike’s bike and you are no longer welcome here,” Mike’s dad said. The boy tried to explain that he had done nothing, but there was no reasoning with the older man.

  I asked Scott, “Are you serious? This is why he has made it his mission in life to recover stolen bikes?” I mean it was an obsession—Mike was ridiculed by all the other cops, and even the dispatchers had assigned him the unofficial call sign of “BIKE-ONE,” mocking his unrelenting mission to find stolen bicycles.

  Scott replied, “Yep that’s it. That’s the reason why. The funny thing is, thirty years later I actually found out who did steal the bike.”

  Scott said, “I was working an event for overtime pay, and I was talking to one of the DJs at the event. The DJ and I had grown up in the same neighborhood and we remembered each other. We started talking, and out of nowhere, the DJ admitted to stealing Mike’s bike.”

  Scott said that the DJ had been arrested several times as a kid for breaking into homes and stealing items. He said that the DJ gave a detailed account of stealing the bike and selling it, and then using the money to buy pot. The DJ laughed at how heartbroken Mike had been and said, “That’s what he gets for showing off his bike, the arrogant dumbass.”

  ”So now you know the reason for the unrelenting search for stolen bikes by ‘BIKE-ONE.’ Mike wanted to try to make sure that he did what he could to get back every stolen bike for every kid in the city. It was a personal goal for him to make a difference to the kids.”

  Mike had a few assignments in the department, but for the most part, aside from catching bicycle thieves, he was not very motivated. He had a reputation for doing the absolute bare minimum to get by. He tried out for Motors, but was rejected.

  He tried out for SWAT and was rejected. He tried out for Detectives and Gangs and was rejected. He tried out for K-9 and dropped out after one day because it was too much work. He tried out for Narcotics over and over again, and after several rejections, was finally was accepted. He made the most of Narcotics, and afterwards spent the majority of the time remaining in his career in patrol.

  In patrol, Mike had a reputation for not showing up on calls to which he’d been assigned. He would say on the radio that he was at the call, and a few minutes later claim that he had been unable to locate the problem or the person who called, and would go back to routine patrol.

  In reality, he would not even have started his car or moved an inch. Yep, he was a real go-getter. He could not figure out why, after several days of not showing up on calls during his shift, the sergeant went ballistic and started making the entire squad toe the line.

  To Mike, it was a mystery why the sergeant was so upset. His sergeant was named Kenny Duke, and the entire shift gave him the nickname the Mad Monk for his unexplained crackdown on the squad. Duke later told me why he had to crack down. It was Mike and his lazy work ethic. Sergeant Duke wanted to make it very clear that if you were assigned to his shift, you would be working and patrolling the streets, not sleeping in the cemetery at night, answering calls on the radio only.

  Another incident involving Mike happened one day in the south end of the city. Speeders were frequent in an affluent area, and BIKE-ONE was assigned to run radar there. Mike was doing this, and catching speeders at a pretty good rate. One of the people he caught was a law student who lived in the area. The law student decided to warn his neighbors of the speed trap set up by Mike. He made up a sign that said “Speed Trap Ahead,” and stood a couple hundred yards down the road from Mike as he ran radar.

  Most cops would have used the sign to their advantage, and mention it on the tickets they gave out. In court, it would work to the cop’s advantage that the speeders ignored the speed-trap sign and continued to speed. BIKE-ONE, however, did not see it that way, and told the law student he had to leave the area and take his sign with him. The law student disagreed. He believed he had a right to free speech, and he was standing on public property. He refused to leave, disobeying BIKE-ONE.

  I don’t know what happened after that. The scene went to shit; a fight broke out. Mike ended up choking the student until he fell unconscious to the ground; afterwards, the guy ended up in handcuffs and on his way to jail. I guess the student had never watched the Dirty Harry or the John Wayne movies that Mike had.

  The student sued Mike and the police department, and, after brief negotiations, the city settled out of court. Mike somehow kept his job, and Scott had to put up with constant teasing from the other cops about his brother’s exploits.

  Mike wasn’t always doing things that made you wonder what the hell he was thinking, though. One night he got a call to a suspicious circumstance in an apartment building. He arrived and, unlike the usual Mike routine, he actually started to dig. He found out that a woman had been kidnapped and held against her will by a man in the apartment building. The man suffered from schizophrenia and had repeatedly raped and beaten the woman for days. He intended on killing her when he was done with her.

  Mike figured out where she was, and was able to rescue her from the mentally ill assailant. Basically, Mike saved the woman’s life by doing what he had dreamed about his entire childhood: being a good cop. This was, however, an anomaly. Mike had worked hard to become a cop, and liked the idea of being a cop, but he usually didn’t want to put in the work required to stay a cop, and a good one.

  Eventually, Mike’s lazy ways caught up with him when he stopped a guy for driving. He had the guy perform the usual FSTs (field sobriety tests), and he failed them all.

  Mike checked his watch; it was nearly time to get off shift, and he did not want to spend the extra time it would take to process a DUI and complete the paperwork. So, Mike being Mike, he told the guy to walk it off—take a hike and not come back to his
car for a while.

  In Mike’s defense, this would have been an accepted practice twenty years before, when he had started his career in law enforcement. Today, however, it is not. Today it is considered dereliction of duty. Mike didn’t care; Dirty Harry wouldn’t waste his time on a mere DUI, so why should Mike?

  Mike left the area after making sure the guy had indeed left his car and started to walk away. What Mike didn’t know was that the guy died a short time later from the alcohol and drugs that were in his system. He was way too drunk to be out walking, driving, or doing anything without supervision. Mike had been negligent, and the department administration was fed up. He was told to resign or be fired.

  He resigned, and ended what he, at least, thought had been an amazing career. Mike did make a difference to those who had their bikes stolen, and he did save a kidnapped women’s life, so I added him here.

  SCOTT PRESTON

  Forget everything you know about Mike. Scott was the exact opposite. You could not have found two more different people raised by the same parents. Where Mike had to overcome the obstacles of not graduating high school, his narcotics arrest record, and a small gaggle of children trailing behind him, Scott had one major obstacle to overcome that haunted him his entire life. No matter where he went, or what he did, Mike had been there first—and, as you can imagine, made quite the impression.

  Scott grew up in the same environment but had no aspirations to be a cop. In fact, as much as Mike loved the idea of being a cop, Scott hated it. Scott grew up hating any authority figure. It was not that hard to figure out why, and probably to be expected, given that every authority figure he came in contact with thought they knew exactly what to expect from him based on their experience with Mike. To understand why Scott hated cops so much and yet became one, you have to, as usual, understand his story.

  Scott rarely talked to anyone about himself. He hated attention of any kind—again, just the opposite of Mike. Eventually though, I was able to gain his trust, and one day he opened up (just a little bit) about his strange hatred of cops and why he worked as one anyway. Here is what he told me:

  When Scott was maybe six or seven years old, the Watts riots were raging in California, and he watched on TV as a city was set on fire. He said he asked his mom why people were doing that. She replied that they were mad about how they were being treated, so they fought back against the people they saw as being in charge.

  Scott understood this at a gut level. It seemed to his seven-year-old mind like everyone in charge was an obstacle to him being happy, because they had already established in their minds who he was before he ever met them. Scott watched the rioters and thought, “So that’s how I fight back?”

  The next day, he and some friends were playing on a corner when one of the city cops drove past. The cop stopped and waved. Scott unleashed all of his frustration on the cop, and started calling him names and throwing rocks at the police car. The cop was dumbfounded, and then really pissed off. He jumped out and started to chase Scott and his friends. He didn’t catch them, and Scott said that for the first time, he felt empowered. It felt great to fight back against “them,” the authority figures.

  Several weeks went by, and Scott was on the same corner, playing alone. A car pulled up and he looked up. It was the cop he had thrown rocks at a couple of weeks earlier. The cop got out of the police car and said, “Hey kid! Come here for a minute.”

  Scott could tell by the cop’s body language he was angry. Scott stood his ground, already stubborn beyond belief. The cop grabbed him and beat the hell out of him, right there on the corner, in broad daylight. Scott said that all he could do was try to cover his face to protect it from the blows raining down on him—and then suddenly he was air born, flying through the air into a nearby shrub. The cop got back in his police car and left. Scott said it took him several minutes to get out of the shrubs, as he was pretty badly beat up.

  The incident left an impression on him. Cops were the enemy, one of many enemies in his life. Scott said that as an adult, he understood that he had caused the incident, but he still hated cops, period. I was stunned at the story but even more perplexed at how this angry kid had become a cop himself.

  Scott said that he had gone into the military after high school, and that the recruiter he talked to showed him a recruiting video of a military cop working on a base. The cop had complete autonomy, and was basically left alone unless something went to shit. Then he would arrive at the scene, deal with the problem, and leave. Basically, the cop was in charge, and no one was in charge of him.

  Something clicked in Scott’s head. Here was the answer he was looking for. Instead of always fighting authority figures, he would become an authority figure. He signed up and spent the next six years in the military as a military cop. The fit was perfect. He had found his niche. A huge contradiction …a cop who hated cops. But it worked for Scott.

  Scott excelled in the military, and for the first time in his life he was out from under Mike’s toxic shadow. Scott received a couple of medals for excellence, and two early promotions. When his enlistment was up, Scott came home and jumped through the hoops required to become a civilian cop. But he had forgotten what it was like to be in Mike’s shadow, and was soon to get a reality check.

  Everywhere he applied for cop jobs he had to answer the question, “Are you related to Mike Preston?” When he answered yes, the interview would go south, and it would be obvious that he was not getting hired. But Scott was determined to prove himself.

  Eventually, he was hired—by the same department where Mike was. Scott said that he purposely chose to apply there to show everyone that he was not Mike. That there was one Preston who would work his ass off, and do more than talk.

  Where Mike applied and was rejected for almost every specialty in the department, Scott doubled down his efforts and did get accepted onto the SWAT team. He was a K-9 handler as well. He got assigned to Detectives, and also had a very intense and productive run in the Gang unit. Scott hopped from specialty to specialty; some units even tried to recruit him into their unit. The narcotics sergeant and lieutenant both asked him to come to their strike force; he told me he’d refused.

  Scott felt, as I did, that the narcotics unit had been compromised, and that there was too many information leaks that could only be coming from the unit itself. The lessons of childhood had taught him to rely only on himself and to be wary of his peers. He still did not trust cops, and probably never would.

  Scott received medals for his actions on dangerous calls. Again, he was the polar opposite of Mike and his infamous fight with the speed-trap-sign holder. Scott excelled at almost everything he did as a cop.

  Scott had a pretty successful career, and was doing pretty well as a loner. He was even recruited by the SWAT team commander after he had left the unit and asked to return to SWAT after he was witness to a drive-by shooting. Scott caught the suspects after a high-speed chase across the city, and they were later convicted. Scott didn’t end up rejoining the SWAT team, however, because he did not want the event to be exploited by the team commander. He just wanted the unsolicited attention to go away. He really did not like to be singled out or recognized for his work. He just wanted to make a difference, but to do it quietly.

  I did notice that Scott had an unusual gift on the streets. He could remember peoples’ faces and names after a brief conversation with them, and he could still recall them years later. I asked him about it one night, and in usual Scott fashion, he denied knowing what I was talking about. I pressed him about it, and eventually he opened up a bit.

  Scott said that he and his brother Mike both actually had some pretty serious talents that no one knew of. Mike had been tested by the school district when he was younger after a teacher claimed he was mildly mentally challenged. The school district brought in their resident expert on intelligence testing, and tested the allegedly mildly retarded child.

  Several hours later, the expert emerged and told Mike’s anxious fathe
r the news. He explained the tests and what they were designed to measure. He then dropped the bomb on Mike’s father: Mike had tested incredibly high on the intelligence test. So high, in fact, that he was rated in the middle of the genius category. Scott said his dad still beamed with pride when he told this story at family gatherings. Mike was a genius—a lazy, legend-in-his-own-mind genius. Mike had unlimited potential and never used it. I could see this irritated Scott unbelievably.

  “So what was your gift, then?”

  He tried to avoid the question, but eventually admitted it was both a gift and a curse. I asked again, “What is it?”

  “You’ve already noticed my memory. It’s true I remember people and names, but I also remember situations and scenarios. I’d conduct interviews in the Gangs unit and in Detectives, and write the reports later entirely from memory, in incredible detail. I could actually remember the case numbers of cases years later. Street addresses, phone numbers, names and case numbers all stuck in my head, along with names and faces.”

  “I can see that this is an amazing gift. So what’s the curse?”

  Scott sighed and said, “That same recall and memory make it impossible to forget the really bad shit we see. Think about that. I can’t pick and choose what I remember; I remember it all—every dead child, every rape victim, every fatal car crash, every murder victim, and every real asshole we meet. I can’t go anywhere and not see people I know from work. I know details about them, good and bad. Get it? There is no escape. I take this shit with me everywhere I go. On the streets, that memory works for me. I can find people, remember their names, who their family members are and what they’ve done, but I can’t shut it off.”

  I had never thought about memory that way before. No wonder the dude was so fucked-up and edgy.

  Here is an example of one incident in which I know Scott was involved. He mostly worked alone, and spent a lot of time talking to people on the streets. He believed strongly that he could learn from anyone, and treated everyone with respect until they forced him to do otherwise.